Thursday, March 30, 2006

The leftist National Catholic Reporter, who never met a revolution they didn't love, is now criticizing Mugabe...

One interesting note is the silence of many of the Catholic bishops...one suspects it is because both the Jesuits in the Harare area and the Bethlehem fathers in the Gweru area preached liberation theology, (which is also loved by NCR) ...

Religious groups expressed concern -- but mostly from outside the country. Religious leaders inside Zimbabwe are divided. Mugabe, a Catholic educated by Jesuit missionaries, regularly attends Mass in the capital, Harare. Zimbabwe’s bishops’ conference (the county has nine Catholic bishops) has been largely quiet on bad governance, economic mismanagement, graft and human rights violations, and has not organized to apply much pressure on Mugabe.

One exception is Pius Alick Vundla Ncube, archbishop of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city.

From his modest office lined with posters of Pope John Paul II, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, Ncube told NCR that while many of Zimbabwe’s religious leaders sit on the fence, he is prepared to die for the country’s poor and disenfranchised.

He doesn’t hesitate to call Mugabe “arrogant” and a “dictator.” He has charged that the president and his political party are using food as a political weapon.

Ncube has been threatened, and he told NCR he is under constant surveillance by government spies in the Zimbabwe’s national intelligence organization....

What is different with Ncube? Well, to start out, he's a Ndebele, not a Mashona...

Ncube’s opposition began some 15 years ago when he was involved with rescuing ethnic Ndebele villagers from massacre at the hands of Mugabe’s notorious army unit, the Fifth Brigade. The president said he was putting down an insurgency, but human rights groups in the country are calling it genocide. As many as 25,000 Ndebele died in what is called the Gukurahundi tragedies.

Many of the liberation fighters were Mashona...the Ndbele were split, since they were a traditional warrior tribe, and many of the men joined the Rhodesian army/police...there were families with sons on both sides of the conflict...And after Mugabe won, there was an open persecution of the Ndebele...tribal conflice goes back many years. The Mashona arrived first (and made Great Zimbabwe) but the Ndbele were an offshoot of the warrior Zulu tribe...LINK